Quotes

If you want to share an anecdote or story from your life, pretend the readers weren’t there. Because they weren’t. “You had to be there” never makes a joke funny.

Readers crave your anecdotes and stories. They really do. So give ‘em the whole megillah. Instead of, “The party was a riot!� or “I’m depressed today,� carefully explain why. Elaborate. Parties and depression are perfectly good writing subjects. The Great Gatsby, for instance, has plenty of both.

Anything makes a good subject, as long as you take your time and crystallize the details, tying them together and actually telling a story, rather than offering a simple list of facts. Do readers really want to know how miserable you are? Yes. But they’re going to want details, the precise odor of your room, why you haven’t showered in a week, or how exactly somebody broke your heart. One–liners won’t suffice.

At the same time, you don’t want to over–explain yourself. Understatement can be thunderous, or humorous, or heartbreaking. Or all three.

Google is undoubtedly having an impact on the evolution of the English language. I’d be surprised if the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary don’t have a secret threshold number of hits needed for new words to become official. “Blog� was recently added (3.7 million Google hits). I’m sure “Findability� is next (3,690 Google hits). Google is changing authority in ways we don’t fully understand.

As information becomes increasingly disembodied and pervasive, we run the risk of losing our sense of wonder at the richness of human communication.

And in the context of e-commerce, I’m fascinated and encouraged by the ability of customer reviews on sites like Amazon and Epinions to empower and inform consumers, increasing pressure on companies to build better products.

Interestingly, these reviews are driven by participation economies that reward the Top Reviewers^AM with attention and trust. Note that the #1 Top Reviewer at Amazon (4550 book reviews) is Harriet Klausner^AM, formerly an acquisitions librarian in Pennsylvania. This just goes to show that librarians were destined to rule the Web.

Why do people use Google Maps? Because it’s just so nice to use. Microsoft’s Terraserver gave users access to high resolution satellite images many years before Google Maps did the same. (In fact, while attempting to be clever, I inadvertently terrified my to-be roommate: I used the service to view an aerial photograph of his home and asked him some leading questions about the stuff in his backyard. It took until the second quarter of college before he even talked to me, and then only warily.) But, it wasn’t until Google rethought online maps that the security and privacy issues of such a service came into the national conscience. Why? Because whereas Microsoft had given access to satellite imagery, Google made them accessible.

[Bracket Notation for Editing is] simply three sets of square brackets. The first set denotes deletion, the second set denotes addition, and the third set denotes a comment. It’s easiest to explain by example. Let’s start with a simple sentence plagued by two typical errors:

An editor might revise the sentence to:

In academia, in industry, and in the commercial world, there is a widespread belief that computing science as such has been all but completed and that, consequently, computing has matured from a theoretical topic for the scientists to a practical issue for the engineers, the managers, and the entrepreneurs..

I would therefore like to posit that computing’s central challenge, ”How not to make a mess of it,” has not been met. On the contrary, most of our systems are much more complicated than can be considered healthy, and are too messy and chaotic to be used in comfort and confidence. The average customer of the computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed.

For us scientists it is very tempting to blame the lack of education of the average engineer, the shortsightedness of the managers, and the malice of the entrepreneurs for this sorry state of affairs, but that won’t do. You see, while we all know that unmastered complexity is at the root of the misery, we do not know what degree of simplicity can be obtained, nor to what extent the intrinsic complexity of the whole design has to show up in the interfaces. We simply do not know yet the limits of disentanglement. We do not know yet whether intrinsic intricacy can be distinguished from accidental intricacy.

To put it bluntly, we simply do not know yet what we should be talking about.. The moral is that whether computing science is finished will primarily depend on our courage and our imagination.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by…
— Douglas Adams^WP

This new version does away with menus and toolbars and replaces them with new paradigms such as the Ribbon, Contextual Tabs, and Galleries.

An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say.

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it’s queerer than we can suppose.

I begin to think that I have a genius for working like an ox over totally irrelevant subjects… I am filled with an excruciating sense of never having gotten anywhere—but when I sit down and try to discover where it is I want to get, I’m at a loss… The thought of growing into a professor gives me the creeps. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself and my pupils into believing that the thing that we are looking for is in books! I don’t know where it is—but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn’t in books. —It isn’t in travel. —It isn’t in California. —It isn’t in New York… Where is it? And what is it, after all? Thus one real result of my Los Angeles stay was the elimination of Anthropology from the running. I suddenly realized that all of my primitive and American Indian excitement might easily be incorporated in a literary career. —I am convinced now that no field but that of English literature would have permitted me the almost unlimited roaming about from this to that which I have been enjoying. A science would buckle me down—and would probably yield no more important fruit than literature may yield me!—If I want to justify my existence, and continue to be obsessed with the notion that I’ve got to do something for humanity—well, teaching ought to quell that obsession—and if I can ever get around to an intelligent view of matters, intelligent criticism of contemporary values ought to be useful to the world. This gets back again to Krishna’s dictum: The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.

The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantic. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller, marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his product into cash; marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating, delivering, and finally consuming it.

In a sense Ford was both the most brilliant and the most senseless marketer in American history. He was senseless because he refused to give the customer anything but a black car. He was brilliant because he fashioned a production system designed to fit market needs. We habitually celebrate him for the wrong reason, his production genius. His real genius was marketing. We think he was able to cut his selling price and therefore sell millions of $500 cars because his invention of the assembly line had reduced the costs. Actually he invented the assembly line because he had concluded that at $500 he could sell millions of cars. Mass production was the result, not the cause, of his low prices.

Of course, I’d do it again and in the same way, given my purposes, even with what more I now know—the good and the bad, the power of facts, and the limits of rhetoric. If your mission is the moon, you don’t use a car. Don Marquis’s cockroach, Archy, provides some final consolation: “An idea is not responsible for who believes in it.â€?